A/N: My first fic ever! Please R&R.

This story takes place after Season 3. Instead of discovering Earth, the crew reenters cryostasis (a la The End of the Universe) and allows the Lexx to drift until he's able to find a planet suitable to his dietary needs. However, this takes longer than anticipated, and a starving, unconscious Lexx crash lands on an unfamiliar world.

Old wars are rekindled, and following the destruction of Water, Kai may have regained something he lost millennia ago…

All of these characters and most of the concepts belong to the creators of Lexx, etc. I'm just manipulating them for my own weird enjoyment and I claim no ownership.

Chapter One: Awakening

The interior of the Lexx was desiccated, a dry husk, and the once continuous stream of electrical impulses that governed its biomechanical functions had slowed to nearly nothing. The great insect was dying. It recognized that it had crashed on a planet ripe with decaying organic matter; it could feel the edible loam in which it was half-buried, but it couldn't muster up the energy required to open its mouth and ingest the material. So instead it stagnated, its tiny bug mind processing sluggish thoughts, and it felt neither regret nor sorrow as it waited to pass away.

But then, something inside of its massive echoing depths moved. Something made a very quiet sound.

It was the pneumatic hiss of an opening cryopod.

The cryopod's lid swung open slowly and heavily, resisting centuries of neglected maintenance, but it was a well-built thing and it performed its duty. Its occupant sat up, wreathed in the ensuing cloud of gases, and glanced around, absorbing his surroundings with disinterest. After a moment he stood and walked to the cryopods' control panel, shedding ice as he went.

The cryopod chamber was in disarray. Wires lay tangled across the floor and the living walls had acquired a papery quality due to the Lexx's malnourishment. Kai brushed the last bits of ice off of his arms as he bent to retrieve 790, who had presumably fallen during the crash. After a cursory examination of the robot head, he determined that it was damaged beyond repair; it was silent, its eyeholes empty. Its casing had been ruptured and most of its internal structure was exposed, including its small portion of human brain, which was squashed into a pink, pulpy mass that dribbled out when Kai tilted the head experimentally.

The dead assassin displayed no emotion at the loss of 790. He set it aside and went to check on the status of Xev and Stanley, but before he returned to the control panel he found himself wandering over to the pods instead.

Xev's eyes were closed and her lips were blue. Although it was difficult to see through the fogged glass of the pod, Kai could tell that a thin crust of ice had formed over most of her body, just as it had with him. They had been in cryostasis for a long time – perhaps even longer than they had been before they'd awoken in the orbit of Fire and Water.

He paused, and then touched the glass, his pale fingers coming away wet with condensation. The pods were warming. Apparently his had been the first to unthaw, and therefore had opened automatically; the others should be soon to follow. It immediately occurred to him that the cryo-systems had failed due to the Lexx's critical state, but no concern registered on his face as he stepped away and began to work on the control panel. After several moments he'd received no results: the system was down completely, and he would have to wait for Xev and Stan to wake up on their own.

It could take hours or even days for their pods to reach the appropriate temperature. Kai closed his eyes and didn't even bother to sit down while he prepared to wait, motionlessly and patiently, for his companions to reawaken.

He stood on the crest of the hill, watching dispassionately as the fiery blaze of the Lexx's weapon grew larger in the sky. He was not alone. Prince was next to him, dressed all in white, his face turned upward.

"What's that?" Prince asked, his voice quiet and inflectionless.

"The end of your planet, and of you," Kai replied.

"I think I should be sad. But I'm not."

Kai didn't turn away as he and Prince were engulfed in white light.

Kai's eyebrows furrowed as the memory randomly surfaced. It seemed that something had come afterwards, something he'd forgotten during his long, cold cryosleep. He wasn't troubled by it, not exactly, but in an inexplicable way it commanded his attention. It was like touching the brain of the Divine Predecessor for the first time in the Lexx so long ago and hearing, very faintly, that sound: yo way yo…

xxx

Outside the Lexx, the earth heaved and from the displaced ground came a loud, unpleasant squelch. Something was moving. Wet clods of soil began to tumble down as the land seemed to billow and hump upward, forming a hill dozens of meters high, a weirdly organic action. It was not the movement of tectonic plates or built-up gases; it was the migration of an organism from deep below the surface. And then the ground was breached – a white, moist, fat thing emerged, its skin bulging grotesquely. It looked like corpse-flesh, although it was very definitely alive. For a moment it lingered, quivering and exposed, before emitting a bass gurgle and wriggling back down beneath the dirt.

Then the silence returned and all was as it had been before.

xxx

Kai felt the Lexx lurch suddenly beneath his feet. He knew it wasn't a voluntary movement, as the Lexx was too near death to maneuver itself. The disturbance continued for quite some time, but Kai kept his balance, and when the tremors finally stopped he began to make his way to the bridge to see if he could find the source of the problem.

At the time his actions didn't strike him as incongruous, since the dead assassin was not accustomed to self-examination. Once he'd arrived at the bridge, however, he was vaguely puzzled by his uncharacteristic curiosity. The dead did not have motivation. But here he was, acting on his own impulses. He narrowed his eyes and pushed the thought from his mind.

The Lexx's viewscreen was dark. This didn't surprise Kai, because it stood to reason that the ship's optic nerves had shut down along with most of its other systems. Trying to patch directly into the nerves wouldn't work, either, not with 790 incapacitated; his only other option was to take a moth outside for a look around.

Yet his brief interest in the disturbance was short-lived. Xev and Stanley weren't in any immediate danger, so there was no reason for him to do anything else. He left the bridge and walked back toward the cryochamber.

xxx

Xev never got used to the feeling of waking up after cryostasis. Maybe it was the cluster lizard in her, the part that thrived in warm temperatures, but she didn't think that human beings were meant to be frozen solid over and over again. For a minute she felt sorry for Kai; after all, this was what his entire life consisted of. Well, his version of life, anyway. But it wasn't as if he particularly cared.

She sat up, fingering bits of ice from her hair. "Kai?" she asked, her voice weak. "Stanley? Seven-ninety?"

It was only then that she glanced around and realized the extent of their problem. Something about the interior of the Lexx looked wrong – the walls looked shriveled, and everything was either broken or showed signs of having been tossed about in a violent collision. Now that she was rapidly returning to full consciousness, she noticed that Kai's cryopod was already open and Stan's was still closed, with him inside it. Kai was nowhere to be seen.

She stepped warily out into the open, skirting around tangles of wire and other bits of shrapnel, gazing at all the damage.

"Seven-ninety!" Xev rushed over to the robot head and almost tripped over the protein regenerator in the process, which was shattered on the ground. She carefully lifted 790 from the rubble and turned him over. A piece of brain dripped onto her wrist.

"Oh, Seven-ninety," she breathed, running her fingers over his face panel.

Even though most of the time she'd spent with 790 recently – a relative term, as she'd been asleep for centuries – had consisted of him calling her The Slut or other variations thereof, she still had feelings for the robot head. Maybe not the type of feelings he would've wished for before he was reprogrammed to love Kai instead, but feelings nonetheless. 790 had been a part of their weird Lexx family. She couldn't quite wrap her mind around the fact that he was gone; he'd been with her from the very beginning, even before she'd met Stanley and Kai, so in a way he really was her oldest friend.

She carried 790 over to the cryopods' control panel and set him down there as she began to press buttons in order to wake up Stanley. Kai had repaired the robot's brain once before; maybe he could again. Somewhere deep inside, though, she realized that her optimism might be futile. The other time, 790's brain had merely been removed, not completely squashed into a pulp as it was now. Plus, the protein regenerator looked beyond saving.

Xev frowned as Stan's cryopod didn't respond to the sequence she'd just typed.

"That won't work."

She looked up to see Kai standing in the doorway, gazing with his own personal variety of moody detachment at her and the control panel. She felt a small leap of joy at the sight of him – and a small leap of something else, too, despite herself. But she pushed that feeling aside. By this point she'd resigned herself to the inevitable fact that Kai was dead and could never love her, even though he seemed to appreciate the unrequited affection she had for him in a roundabout, dead kind of way.

She said his name and hugged him, and kissed him briskly on the cheek while he stared ahead at Stanley's cryopod. "Thank you," he said mechanically. "Most of the Lexx's systems are down. We appear to have crash landed on a planet, although I do not know if it is inhabitable."

"Well, let's find out!" Xev removed herself from Kai and gingerly walked over to Stanley, peering in at him through the glass. "But first let's wake up Stan."

"We might not have to," Kai observed. Stanley seemed to have suddenly awakened by himself, and was now looking back and forth at the two of them and gesturing to be let out. The sound of his voice was reduced to incoherent mumbling by the glass barrier. Xev tapped on the pod and raised her eyebrows at him. She mouthed, slowly: hold on. Then she straightened up and looked over her shoulder at Kai, shrugging. "What do we do? I think that one's broken."

"The cryo-systems have failed completely. However…" Kai appeared to briefly evaluate the situation, and then he raised his arm and pointed it at the pod. Xev recognized his gesture and quickly moved aside to stand behind the control panel, where she placed one hand on 790 and glanced alternatively between Kai and Stan. Kai fired his brace at the pod and its lid popped off neatly, landing with a very audible crunch on the floor, while Stan winced and gave Kai a reproachful stare.

"Gee, thanks, although you coulda killed me," Stan complained as he exited the cryopod and circumnavigated its smashed lid. "Woah, what happened here?"

Much like Xev had done at first, Stan was absorbing the sight of all the damage. He took his hat off, smoothed his hair, and put his hat back on. While Xev explained everything to him – at least, the small portion of everything that she'd figured out so far – Kai wandered over to the corner of the room. He looked down.

The container that had held his remaining store of protoblood was destroyed. He remembered securing it before he had entered cryostasis, but the crash must have been too severe -- and now his protoblood was pooled viscously around its container's shattered remains, already half-absorbed by the Lexx's porous skin; he remembered…

The surface of the planet Fire spiderwebbed with red light before it exploded, sending fragments of stone rocketing out into empty space at an immeasurable velocity. Kai's body was instantly vaporized, and it took a moment for his decarbonized cells to reconstitute themselves; by that time he was floating in the vacuum of space with Prince nowhere in sight.

He knew he wasn't alone, however, for he heard the featureless drone of millions of voices and he saw the spiral of luminous, skeletal forms as they swarmed like hornets upward and away from the wreckage. He recognized them as the souls of the damned, and he watched as several entered the Lexx. One of them did not return.

Mere seconds later, even after surviving the shockwaves of the explosion, the planet Water destabilized and self-immolated. Kai again observed the release of souls. After the majority of them had passed him by, he noticed that one seemed to be behaving differently; it loitered in the distance, then approached him.

Kai stared at his soul. His soul stared back.

It moved forward until it touched him, and afterwards it disappeared.